The YouTube Mental Health Plan

For some reason, over the last five years I’ve started micro-dosing YouTube videos to try and improve my mental health. 

I have no idea how that happened. 

It started with researching content marketing best practice videos for work and now suddenly Joe Rogan has me thinking about investing in NFTs, taking Ivermectin and calling him Dad. 

However you want to feel right now, there is a YouTube video that can help you feel that way. Even if it’s only for a moment. 

If you’re feeling sad, you can watch a cute video of a dog and panther becoming unlikely friends. 

If you’re feeling unmotivated, you can watch a compilation of the late Kobe Byrant at basketball practice motivating his team. 

If you’re feeling horny and alone, you’re on the wrong website. 

There are thousands of hours of content on there to help you in all aspects of your life. Make you feel all kinds of feelings. All you have to do is search for it. 

I’ve found myself using the platform for this very reason and I’m taking the time to reflect. It can’t be good for us right? 

How desperate to be motivated or to be inspired that we explore the recesses of what is essentially the world's collection of “Funniest Home Videos”. 

YouTube even has a place in my own spiritual life. Sermons from people like Tim Keller and Steven Furtick have helped me understand myself and understand God better. Like fuck, even God uses YouTube. 

Some of the advice on YouTube is so good. Like it’s really really good advice. Way better than some of the shit your friends tell you when you go out for a beer. I’d rather listen to Jordan Peterson tell me everything is going to be okay over some 28-year-old who had one to many batch brews this morning and is feeling a little jittery. 

The scary part about YouTube is that it also owns a large part of how we improve ourselves in other ways, outside of our mental and spiritual life. 

You can learn how to do almost anything on YouTube. Just search “how to learn to tie a tie” and immediately you don’t need a Dad anymore. It’s crazy. All these orphans that felt like something was missing from their life now have a perfectly good substitute that’s exactly the same as a real Dad. 

It can’t be good for us right? The fact that you can learn almost anything on YouTube means that YouTube is a way for you to become whoever you want to be. 

That is a very scary and a very dangerous value proposition. Especially when anyone can teach you how to become who you want to be. If the journey is more important than the destination, then your guide sure as shit is the most important person in your life. 

We’re asking the algorithm to help us become the people we want to be and the algorithm just gives it to us. It doesn’t ask us why we want to be the people we want to be, or consider what the best and least destructive way for us to get there is. It just gives us what we want. 

I’m not sure about your sense of self-control or self-awareness but I rarely know what’s good for me. I know that for certain. Not because of the patterns of self-destruction I’ve engaged with over the years but mainly because I’m married now and she’s very good at helping me realise when I’m actively choosing something that isn’t really that good for me. 

I think the biggest thing that YouTube might be robbing us of is the ability for us to take control of our own problems. To find our own answers to the issues in our lives that we face. Instead we take the answers someone else has come up with and we apply them to our situation. 

I’m not sure that’s entirely fair to our own experiences. 

And sure, it can be helpful for someone to share their experience and what they learnt from that situation to bring some clarity to the circumstances in your own life (especially when we can’t see it clearly), but it’s rarely ever exactly the same. 

It can’t be good for us right?